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Today in History: Happy Birthday to Us Edition

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Shelves at Library of Congress Ft. Meade storage facility — Gail Fineberg photoI anticipate that one of my regular features will be to highlight or comment upon ? hopefully every day ? the Library?s ?Today in History? page. There are a lot of ?on this day? pages on the Web, but I?d wager that none of them benefits so directly from the combined resources and expertise of LOC curators and staff.

We picked today to launch the Library?s first blog because it is our 207th birthday. Appropriately, the April 24 edition of ?Today in History? highlights our humble birth.

At the last ?official? count, the Library had more than 134 million items in its collections ? books, manuscripts, sound recordings, movies, videos, photographs, prints, maps, musical scores, and then some. But at the beginning of the 19th century? Not so much.

On this day in 1800, Congress appropriated $5,000 to begin the Library, which began with a whopping 740 books and three maps.

Did I mention ?humble??

Comments

  1. Happy Birthday, LC!

    I like the blog.

    But now that you have the blog, and an RSS feed for it, have you considered an RSS feed for the “Today in History” page? I for one would subscribe to it.

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